What is Attribute Oriented Programming?

XDoclet has brought the concept of attribute-oriented programming to Java. Until JDK 1.5, the Java language had no support for annotations; now XDoclet uses the Javadoc tag format (@attribute) to specify class-, field-, or method-level metadata attributes. These attributes are used to generate hibernate mapping file automatically when the application is built. This kind of programming that works on attributes is called as Attribute Oriented Programming.